Preparing my Practice for Working with Clients (Second Revision):

Ilana — as someone who also struggles with drawing firm boundaries with family and friends as to what I take on (and thus compromising my own mental wellbeing or ability to enjoy my own free time), I resonate so much with what you have written and appreciate the list of potential solutions that you have drawn up, as I think that these can be implemented generally in life outside of public interest or the legal industry itself. I was curious about what thoughts you have had on helping employees separate work and their personal lives beyond encouragement. As someone who had a work phone for two years, I often found myself constantly checking on my work phone out of paranoia that an emergency would arise or that I may have missed an email from an attorney. The law firm that I had worked at had tried to resolve this issue by telling us that the expectation was to be somewhat online and on your phone until 11 p.m., after which you could relax. I would love to read what your proposed plan for your practice might be and compare notes from my previous experiences. I agree wholeheartedly with points 4 and 5 on PTO and mental health, as those are great ways to encourage people to actively separate themselves from their work and begin processing (and learning how to process) any vicarious trauma that may have been repressed. - Gillian

Preparing my Practice for Working with Clients:

Considering Vicarious Trauma in my Practice

Unfortunately, just learning the term "vicarious trauma" did not solve all of my problems. It gave me the language to understand what I was experiencing and that I was not alone in it, but I still struggled in balancing empathy, which is one of the things that made me good at my job, and maintaining healthy boundaries that would make the type of work I want to do sustainable. It led me to the key question: What would it look like to build a practice where lawyers continue to engage with trauma in order to do their job in a way that is not damaging to their own well-being?

The answer to this question has to be more nuanced than "go outside more" or "find creative expressions". While all of those sound "right" as coping mechanisms, they never seemed to fully solve the problem. So I've been working to look beyond the easy fixes to come up with a list of things that I want to see in my practice to support myself and other lawyers who interact with trauma every day:

1. Encourage open dialogue about secondhand trauma and how it impacts people in the workplace -- These conversations cannot just be about the existence of secondhand trauma. Instead, it needs to address the symptoms of secondhand trauma, even the ones that are hard to hear, like a perceived lack of empathy due to burnout.

2. Support people in building coping skills early on in their career -- This is important because it gives people time to build important coping skills before they are in the early phases of burnout, which makes it easier to build those skills

An excellent start. It accomplishes very well one of the most important functions of a first draft: to clear away the brush and show the question around which the next draft can grow.

We can leave for another moment the question whether the science bears out the hypothesis of vicarious trauma. After we've read Frank Putnam in a couple of weeks it would perhaps make sense to return to this question in a revision. The essay's central idea doesn't depend on any particular theoretical formulation for its overwhelming force. We could also say that lawyering for individual clients not only means forming a personal relationship, but also one directly fraught with the client's vulnerability and the lawyer's responsibility. However we formulate the nature of the resulting psychic cost to the lawyer, it can't just be dissociated, as you say. But on that point Larry Joseph's "Something Split" in Lawyerland, which we are also about to read, is succinct and disturbing.

So how should practice involving individual clients, like other types of practice—by social workers, psychotherapists, school counselors—that involve similar "empathy costs" be organized to be psychically fulfilling, or at least not damaging, to the lawyer? The best route to improvement, I think, is to put that question at the center of the next draft.

What is Vicarious Trauma?

Moving Forward

Unfortunately, just learning the term "vicarious trauma" did not solve all of my problems. It gave me the language to understand what I was experiencing and that I was not alone in it, but I still struggled in balancing empathy, which is one of the things that made me good at my job and maintaining healthy boundaries that would make the type of work I want to do sustainable. By the time I left Her Justice, I was experiencing the mental and physical symptoms of vicarious trauma.

It took me a while to recover, and I still feel the impacts at times, but despite that, I am diving back into public interest law this summer at Kids in Need of Defense. I know this is the career that I want to pursue, so I am going into this summer with a plan to protect my well-being while also bringing compassion to the work. I’m going to speak with my supervisor early, to learn about how they cope with exposure to second-hand trauma. I’m going to maintain a routine, which includes healthy eating and exercise, both of which have been shown to mitigate the impacts of vicarious trauma. Finally, I’m going to try different types of boundaries, to see what works for me. I hope that this summer I can begin building a practice in public interest law that is sustainable.

It is impossible to predict exactly how vicarious trauma will impact an individual, but research shows there can be impacts on the physical and mental well-being of attorneys. Mentally, long-term exposure to indirect trauma can impact our ability to regulate emotions, leading to increased anxiety, depression, or aggression Richmond Law Review. Physically, vicarious trauma can impact appetite, sleep, and the immune system. Id..

Vicarious trauma is by no means a new concept, but in the past, it has been considered an anticipated part of the profession for many public interest lawyers, leading to a culture of avoidance and acceptance, instead of a culture of support (Richmond Law Review). Without naming and working to address vicarious trauma, lawyers who began their careers with tremendous compassion for their clients can feel that they are losing that compassion. In reality, they are not losing compassion, but instead, the stress of feeling deep compassion for people who have experienced extreme trauma begins to take a toll on the well-being of the attorney, causing them to distance themselves, which can manifest as being less compassionate Concepts in Vicarious Traumatization.

Vicarious Trauma in Public Interest Lawyering:

-- By IlanaDutton - 15 Feb 2023

Introduction

In my junior year of college, as an intern with Northwest Immigrants Rights Project, I took every case home with me. I'm not referring to the physical case file, but instead to the emotional baggage that each case inevitably came with. It quickly started impacting every aspect of my life, including my relationships with the people around me. People in the office would talk about "self-care" but those felt like empty words to me, since going on walks, exercising, and making time for friends, which are my versions of self-care, just did not seem to be cutting it with what I was experiencing. By the time I finished my internship in May of my senior year, I was feeling detached from the work I was doing, since it was the only way I could protect myself, but it also made me worse at my job. I was putting in less effort and it was clear in my work, but I did not have the tools to handle the situation any other way.

I did not have the language to understand what I was experiencing until I began working as a legal assistant at Her Justice in New York City after graduating college. During my second week at the organization, our on-staff social worker did a training with me on "vicarious trauma", which was a term I had never heard before. As she was explaining the concept to me, which I hope to do for all of you in the next section, pieces started falling into place and the last two years began to make more sense. Once I had the language and realized that other people were experiencing the same thing, I felt less alone and more equipped to approach the issue head-on instead of pushing it aside.

Unfortunately, just learning the term "vicarious trauma" did not solve all of my problems. It gave me the language to understand what I was experiencing and that I was not alone in it, but I still struggled in balancing empathy, which is one of the things that made me good at my job and maintaining healthy boundaries that would make the type of work I want to do sustainable.

What is Vicarious Trauma? -- focus on law review/data articles

Thinking about the future -- focus on this summer and beyond

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